TL;DR: Estonia operates a Tier 4 (highest security) data center in Luxembourg with diplomatic immunity. Can actively run critical government services in real-time, not just backups.
This is because everything is in digital form. Essentially all government systems are digital-first, and for the citizen, often digital-only. If the data is lost, there may be no paper records to restore everything from land registry, business registry (operating agreements, ownership records), etc.
Without an out-of-country backup, a reversion to previous statuses means the country is lost (Estonia has been occupied a lot). With it, much of the government can continue to function, as an expat government until freedom and independence is restored.
> Estonia follows the “once-only” principle: citizens provide their data just once, and government agencies re-use it securely. The next step is proactive services—where the government initiates service delivery based on existing data, without waiting for a citizen’s request.
I wish the same concept was in Canada as well. You absolutely have to resubmit all your information every time you do a request. On top of that, federal government agencies still mail each other the information, so what usually can be done in 1 day takes a whole month to process, assuming the mail post isn't on strike (spoiler: they are now).
I think Canada is one of the worst countries in efficiency and useless bureaucracy among 1st world countries.
I wanted to update some paperwork to add my wife as a beneficiary to some accounts. I go to the bank in person and they tell me “call this number, they can add the beneficiary”. I call the number and wait on hold for 30 minutes and then the agent tells me that they will send me an email to update the beneficiary. I get an email over 24 hours later with a PDF THAT I HAVE TO PRINT OUT AND SIGN and then scan and send back to the email. I do that, but then I get another email back saying that there is another form I have to print and sign.
This is the state of banking in Canada. God forbid they just put a text box on the banking web app where I can put in my beneficiary.
Not to mention our entire health care system still runs on fax!
It blows my mind that we have some of the smartest and well educated people in the world with some of the highest gdp per capita in the world and we cannot figure out how to get rid of paper documents. You should be issued a federal digital ID at birth which is attested through a chain of trust back to the federal government. Everything related to the government should be tied back to that ID.
Definitely. Especially when considering that there were 95 other systems in this datacentre which do have backups and
> The actual number of users is about 17% of all central government officials
Far from all, and they're not sure what's recoverable yet ("“It’s difficult to determine exactly what data has been lost.”")
Which is not to say that it's not big news ("the damage to small business owners who have entered amounts to 12.6 billion Korean won.” The ‘National Happiness Card,’ used for paying childcare fees, etc., is still ‘non-functional.’"), but to put it a bit in perspective and not just "all was lost" as the original submission basically stated
My (unpopular?) take is that JavaScript should suffice.
Once I feel the need for TypeScript, I've done something wrong. For example, built my whole frontend with JavaScript or built my backend in JavaScript.
JavaScript's use case for me is sprinkling it where needed in browser. Anything extra and it feels wrong tool for the job.
Frankly, I believe whole existence of TypeScript is a mistake – we should've never used JavaScript at a scale where static typing becomes necessary.
Having said all that, I'd love to be able to write gradually typed JavaScript (i.e. TypeScript) in the browser. Gradual typing is still greatly beneficial, even in my sprinkles.
Render most of the frontend server-side and just use JavaScript for the dynamic bits only, I guess? I personally haven't done it like this since the advent of SPAs, but I'm guessing lots of things are still built like this.
Clojure does many things right and I like it for it a lot.
One thing that I see slowing down real teams building real web stuff with Clojure is the near-dogmatic desire to compose (dare I say hack) everything together from tons of libraries that each have their own understanding of how things should be.
I bet Clojure would be much more popular and nicer to work with if the community would _also_ (i.e. in addition to the current approach) have actively-maintained, batteries-included, generally usable web framework(s). (Is Biff it?)
So that there would be alternative path to choose for us who like the language, but are not fans of the build-your-own-monster approach.
Biff is very batteries included, but because it uses a couple defaults that are not particularly mainstream (XTDB instead of SQL, HTMX/Hyperscript) I imagine newcomers will still have a hard time in it. Learning Clojure, AND graph databases, and potentially HTMX is a bit much. Still, a lot of it is just setup for you. Auth is thoughtful and easy and the server config files are well commented. There are deploy scripts to setup a server in linux and SSH into the production REPL. And if you want to use XTDB, the way Biff has setup document validation is really nice.
I also like using it more than an app running on ClojureScript, personally. There are a lot of ClojureScript wrappers around React, and it's almost a meme. As a react developer, I have not found any of them easier than React. I find them kind of convoluted and un-ergonomic. However, HTMX/Hyperscript works really well with Clojure, because their HTML syntax is just arrays and objects that are easy to manipulate. It's the first time that the whole "code is data" proverb repeated by Clojure enthusiasts has rung true for me.
First-class SQL support will be really nice when XTDB2 becomes stable--I'm planning to make that the default in Biff for the sake of familiarity, then anyone who wants to can switch over to Datalog easily.
TL;DR: Estonia operates a Tier 4 (highest security) data center in Luxembourg with diplomatic immunity. Can actively run critical government services in real-time, not just backups.